NIH awards STTR Phase II to Kitware for Image-Guided Surgery Toolkit

Kitware, Inc. has won a Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II project from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering at the National Institutes of Health (NBIB/NIH). The goal of the project is to develop an open-source, image-guided surgery toolkit. This project is being led by Dr. Kevin Cleary at the Georgetown University Medical Center. The projects leverages Kitware’s current expertise with the Visualization Toolkit (VTK at vtk.org) and the Insight Medical Imaging Toolkit (ITK at itk.org) to produce a software framework for the creation of surgical applications guided by real-time imaging modalities such as ultrasound and CT fluoroscopy. The goal is to produce a simple, fail-safe and robust software toolkit that can be used to create a variety of surgical applications.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the CMake build management software. Established in 1998, Kitware is rapidly growing to support top research and development clients around the world; including such prestigious customers as the US National Labs (Sandia, Los Alamos, Livermore, and Argonne), the National Institutes of Health, the Army and Air Force Research labs, and a variety of academic, commercial and governmental research labs. Our commercial customers range from Fortune 500 oil and gas companies to small medical imaging start ups.